Americanize, My Persecuted Brethren! An Archaeology of a Jewish Agricultural Community in Colorado

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)", at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

During the latter decades of the 19th century, nearly 100 Jewish agricultural experiments cropped up across the United States (with dozens more in the Americas more broadly). Comprised largely of immigrants from the Pale of Settlement in Russia, they were funded, in part, by Jewish aid organizations established for this purpose. Funders and residents saw these efforts as variably addressing contemporary anxieties surrounding Jewish self-determination and territorialism, agrarianism, collectivism, notions of the deserving poor, and Americanization. While some brief histories of the movement exist, these communities have been largely ignored by archaeologists. This paper presents preliminary results of my doctoral fieldwork at one such community in Cotopaxi, Colorado. This paper reckons with mythologies of the West and the place of marginal communities on the “frontier.” To do so, it examines the material challenges, successes, and failures at Cotopaxi, and analyzes this data through the lens of migration, environment, and utopia.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2025

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Contact(s): Nicole Haddow